A growing number of individuals, enterprises, and organizations have developed their own World-Wide Web (WWW) sites and/or WWW browser pages. These sites and pages may be regularly modified and maintained by more astute entities, because it is becoming increasingly clear that the world economy is being driven by electronic commerce of the Internet. In fact, the annual growth rate of electronic commerce has been exponential in recent years.
With this in mind, capturing and maintaining customers or users at a website are important to an entity's ability to remain competitive and grow its business. Studies have indicated that a user's perception of a WWW site's performance is directly tied to when a user believes that the first displayed browser page has been received and is usable.
Current techniques measure a performance of a site or page by determining when a first page is completely loaded into a browser and becomes viewable and usable to a user. However, this approach is not acceptable and may not adequately reflect the true problem.
This is so, because a user actually perceives that a page is usable once that user views information associated with the page within the user's browser. Furthermore, a single page will span beyond the immediate viewing area of the user. That is, a single page may have some of its content viewable via browser scrolling. So, existing techniques are not obtaining an adequate measure of the problem, which is meaningful for purposes of evaluating perceived user perception of a given browser page or WWW site. The existing techniques measure when the first page loads but not when just viewable content is loaded.